​The City of Lake Forest, IL is replacing all its streetlight bulbs with energy-efficient LEDs. With thousands of lights, data management can be challenging. Each location must be marked complete along with information related to wattage and voltage.

Historically, Streets department staff would capture maintenance information on paper or a laptop. Field notes were then transcribed to spreadsheets for future use. To streamline the process, staff is using a mobile asset collection application, Collector, to handle LED bulb management.

With the free Collector application, staff can perform streetlight maintenance using a tablet or smartphone. Streetlight locations are loaded into the app with predetermined fields that the user populates. These include bulb type, voltage, wattage and inventory number. Once a bulb is changed to LED, the location point changes color, indicating the action is complete. Data is extracted as a spreadsheet, eliminating the need for post-processing.

This process can be replicated to capture any inventory in the field on a tablet or smartphone. The mobile app is so intuitive, training time is reduced compared to advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. Capturing inventory without desktop GIS software saves money on licensing fees and gives the city the flexibility to reproduce the process for other assets.